The Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison - Research Paper Example

Download file to see previous pages This happens rarely but it does happen and in this kind of scenario we can totally lose our self respect, confidence and will to live.
A similar scenario was faced by the narrator of the novel ‘the invisible man’. It is about the person who explains that his invisibility owes not to some supernatural cause of biochemical accident but instead to the reluctance of other people to notice him. He finds himself in a position where he considers himself as invisible among the people who are sleepwalking around him and thus can’t notice him (“Invisible man”).
This above mentioned instance is also known as “Alienation". As stated in PsycINFO Database by A. Davids, Alienation is a syndrome composed of five interrelated dispositions: egocentricity, anxiety, distrust, pessimism, and resentment. Alienated individuals are "lone wolves," distrusting their fellow men and apprehensive and ominous about their own future. They tend to apperceive others in their social surroundings as being more alienated than they actually are, yet less alienated than themselves. It is also stated that the alienated person has a "weak ego structure as estimated by experienced clinical judgment." However, when talking about the narrator of ‘the invisible man’, we have to make it crystal clear that his case was different, yet he had most of the symptoms of being alienated as described above. The narrator isolated himself in his room which was a shut-off section of a basement where only white tenants were allowed to live, and disguised himself by wearing dark glasses and a hat. It was not because he had a weak ego structure but he did that because he found ‘white people’ his enemy.
One of the reasons that a person can get himself into the state of loneliness is when he isolates himself from the world and decides to live alienated. It is really dangerous for anyone to isolate himself, so it was dangerous for narrator of ‘the invisible man’. As ...Download file to see next pagesRead More